The present invention relates generally to network and Internet search and interface systems and more particularly to search systems that provide enhanced search functionality.
The present invention also relates to interface systems and methods that provide various search functionality and which interoperate with a variety of applications on a user's computer so as to provide a universal information exchange tool.
With the advent of networks such as the Internet and the multitude of web pages and media content available to a user over the World Wide Web (web), there has become a need to provide users with streamlined approaches to filter and obtain desired information from a network or the web. Search systems and processes have been developed to meet the needs of user to obtain desired information. Examples of such technologies can be accessed through Yahoo!, Google and other sites. Typically, a user inputs a query and a search process returns one or more links related to the query. The links returned may be very related, or they may be completely unrelated, to what the user was actually looking for. The “relatedness” of results to the query may be in part a function of the actual query entered as well as the robustness of the search system (underlying collection system) used.
Queries that users enter are typically made up of one or more words. For example, “hawaii” is a query, so is “new york city”, and so is “new york city law enforcement”. As such, queries as a whole are not integral to the human brain. In other words, human beings do not naturally think in terms of queries. They are an artificial construct imposed on us, in part, by the need to query search engines or look up library catalogs. Human beings do not naturally think in terms of just single words either. What human beings think in terms of are natural concepts. For example, “hawaii” and “new york city” are vastly different queries in terms of length as measured by number of words but they share one important characteristic: they are both made up of one concept each. The query “new york city law enforcement” is different, however, because it is made up of two distinct concepts “new york city” and “law enforcement”. Human beings by nature build queries by entering one or more natural concepts, not simply a variably long sequence of single words.
Current technologies at any of the major search providers, e.g., MSN, Google or any other major search engine site, do not understand queries the same way that human beings create them. This is perhaps the most important reason that prevents search providers from understanding user intent and providing optimal search results and content.
As can be seen there is a need for improved search and interface technology that provides results that are more in line with the actual concepts in which a user may be interested.